Welfare Increases Poverty Instead Of Ending It

Redistribution: Americans have now elected twice a man who said he wanted to spread the wealth around. So how ugly is it going to get? The Senate Budget Committee says welfare spending will nearly double in 10 years.

Using data from the Congressional Research Service and Congressional Budget Office, the Budget Committee's Republican staff has added up what's spent on cash aid, health assistance, housing assistance, and social and family services.

All told, welfare spending will rocket from roughly $800 billion in the current fiscal year to about $1.4 trillion in fiscal 2022 — a nearly 80% jump.

All told, overall welfare spending for the decade will be $11 trillion — "roughly one-quarter of cumulative federal spending," the Budget Committee reports.

And that doesn't even include state spending on welfare, which, when added to federal benefits, was more than $1 trillion in fiscal 2011. That's enough, the Budget Committee tells us, "to mail every household in poverty a check for $60,000 each year."

How did we get here? In Obama-esque fashion, of course. The committee says the unimaginable spending is in part "driven by a series of controversial recruitment methods that include aggressive outreach to those who say they do not need financial assistance."

"Recruitment workers are even instructed on how to 'overcome the word "no"' when individuals resist enrollment," says committee research. "The USDA and Department of Homeland Security also have promotions to increase the number of immigrants on welfare despite legal prohibitions on welfare use among those seeking admittance into the United States."

The best welfare program is not a government plan.

It is a strong, expanding economy, which is, in fact, the only path for overcoming poverty.

Science fiction writer Robert Heinlein noted that "throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man." It is only through free enterprise, which is fed by open trade, unfettered capitalism and liberalized markets, that humans have emerged from their natural state in which life was nasty, brutish and short.

To paraphrase the great Milton Friedman, man's great achievements have not been the product of a government program, a redistributionary scheme or bustling bureaucracy. They are due to the simple profit motive at work in political systems that let people be fittingly compensated for their innovations and efforts.

No system has lifted man's standard of living as free enterprise has. As Friedman also once said, the masses that suffer the most from grinding poverty are those trapped in societies that depart from free enterprise.

"The record of history is absolutely crystal clear," he said. "There is no alternative way so far discovered of improving the lot of ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system."

Washington's focus should be on removing the restraints it has placed on free enterprise rather than busying itself with building a nation of dependents, as it has for the last eight decades.

A growing welfare state helps no one — aside from politicians who traffic in addiction to government — but a burgeoning economy improves everyone's well being.

The best policy? Doubling not welfare spending over the next decade, but the size of the economy.

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